


Mother Russia cries for you

by myrskytuuli



Series: Hetalia avengers short stories [5]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-02
Updated: 2016-06-02
Packaged: 2018-07-11 19:51:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7067692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myrskytuuli/pseuds/myrskytuuli
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the Black Widow meets a man that she cannot figure out, but surely she cannot believe in guardian angels...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mother Russia cries for you

Natalia was dying. She was leaving behind her a red trail in the already dirty snow. The snow in Moscow never stayed clean, and now it would be dirtied even more. Somewhere in the distance the hustle and bustle of the city could be heard, but Natalia was not listening to it. She was listening for footsteps, she was listening and calculating how long it would take for her chasers to get to her.

Natalia was dying and she didn’t know how to feel about it. Death had always been close to her and she had been trained to accept the possibility of death with calmness. She was not however calm, her heart was racing and her lungs burning, trying to compensate for the weakness that grew and grew.

Soon her handlers would find her and put her down. She would go down into the grey snow in the backstreets of Moscow and with her would go down the memory of the red room. This was what made her most bitter. There had been so many girls in the red room, little girls and then much less teenage girls and then even fewer young women. The only place where those girls now existed was in her memory and soon even that memory would disappear. Soon the men chasing her would be the only ones to know of the existence of the red room and their memories would be an insult to the dead.

Natalia probably shouldn’t get this righteous, she had been the one to kill many of those girls. Gladiator fights in sterile white rooms that had turned red by the end of the matches, little girls of no more than twelve staining their hands with blood.

It might be that she deserved to die in the dirty snow, but she wished it wasn’t by the hands of her handlers. She wished it would have been by someone who could at least have the satisfaction of gaining revenge by her death. It would at least be a useful death then.

Natalia was much stronger, faster and resilient than your average assassin, but these men had made her and they knew how to unmake her too.

“Object on sight!” Heavy boots slamming in the snow, rifles lifted to her direction, these were all things Natalia could hear.

A sound of metal hitting skull, screams, a body being thrown against the brick wall. These were also things she could hear.

Turning around, this is what she could see:

Five bodies, dead on the ground. Two had their heads bashed in, one had snapped his neck hitting the wall, and two had died of means she could not instantly recognise. Over the bodies stood a tall man with pale hair and a pink scarf. He was holding a dripping lead pipe. Natalia could not recognise the man, but there was some sense of familiarity in him. Some that she for the life of her could not place.

“Don’t be afraid, Natalia.” He said, like somehow that would be possible. He took a step forwards and Natalia shuffled backwards. Seeing this the man stopped and looked incredibly sad. “I’m sorry I did not mean to frighten you, but you are hurt and need help fast. I can feel you dying already.”

“Who are you!? How did you kill them?!” Her handlers had been all holding firearms, the stranger wasn’t. There had been five of the handlers, the stranger was alone. How had no one heard of the stranger approach? Why did she had the sudden urge to throw herself to the stranger’s arms and cry?

“The red room has never been officially approved by the Russian government. I had a loophole.”

Natalia just blinked. The wound on her side still bled sluggishly and made her feel slow. Nothing coming out of the stranger’s mouth made any sense.

“Come now Natalia. You are safe now. I want to help you.”

“Why?”

“Because I love you.”

Natalia wanted to punch him. Wanted to scream and scratch and stab him. Because I love you. How dare he utter words like that to Natalia, who he had never even met before.

“They have taken all the others from me, but you are still alive. I will not let you die like the other girls. My little girls… Valeria and Oksana and Anna and Elena and Olga and Maria and Eva and…”

He was reciting the names of all the girls in the red room. At least Natalia assumed that the names she didn’t recognise belonged to the girls whose names she had not learned. The list was long, so long. Natalia could see tears forming in the pale blue, no violet, eyes as the man finished his list. Tears were also forming in the corners of her eyes and those were not because of the wound. She had been taught to handle pain without tears.

Natalia had no strength to fight back and more alarmingly no will to fight against being lifted up to the man’s arms, easily as she would weight nothing. There was a lingering scent surrounding the man that reminded her of the home she had lost so long ago. A whiff of pinewoods, home-cooked kasha, a well-loved woollen blankets, and smoky Russian caravan tea.

Natalia cried. For the first time that she could remember, she cried truly, deeply and all-consumingly. She cried as the man carried her for who knows where, humming old lullabies under his breath and holding her in an embrace that felt so much more deep, so much more vast and circling and safe than any embrace had any business being.

 

Natalia woke up in a bed, in a house in central Moscow. There was a cup of warm tea by her bedside and a vase full of sunflowers by the window.

Slipping from the bed, Natalia made her way entirely silently across the room and into the kitchen where her host had his back turned to her and was cooking breakfast. She picked up a knife from the table and knew that she could stab the man in the neck before he could even turn around.

She put the knife down.

“You heal fast for a human.”

“Where are we?”

“In my home.” The man answered and finally turned around, placing the plate in front of Natalia, gesturing for her to sit down. She did.

“You can call me Ivan.” The man finally named himself and sat across from Natalia. “Is the wound gone?”

Natalia lifted her shirt enough to see the now sealed flesh. It would be completely healed in a week. Ivan also looked at the red flesh with curiosity and then returned to his food.

“It would seem that it gave you some of the healing abilities too.”

“The serum? How do you know all this? Who are you really? What’s your connection to the red room?”

Ivan’s violet eyes settled on Natalia’s owns and stayed there. Staring into the eyes almost gave her slight vertigo, but she couldn’t look away either.

“What was pumped into your veins in there, was first taken from me. I cannot forgive that, as what the red room did was evil. Sacrificing Russian children was unforgiveable.”

“You created that serum?”

Ivan didn’t answer, just stared, and the vertigo caused by the pull of those eyes worsened. The spell only ended as the man stood up and broke the eye contact.

“You will no longer be safe in here. There are several organizations that want you dead and the Russian government would rather see you dead than risk the exposure of the red room secrets. You will need to leave the country.” In here Ivan’s voice wavered slightly. “You will not be safe in Russia.”   

As fast as the tremble had come into his voice, it was gone. “You will pose as my sister and travel with me to Helsinki. In there a friend will take you to a ship heading to America. I will return with my real sister back to Moscow. You will head to New York. The Americans are paranoid enough about Russian espionage that anyone after you will have hard enough time getting even through the borders.”

“And you don’t think that for that same reason the Americans won’t take me down?”

“I have spoken on your behalf for an acquaintance in America. Make a good impression on them and you might have entirely new life ahead of you.”

Ivan pulled out a passport, with a picture of a woman with long blonde hair and facial features that resembled Natalia’s own quite a deal. Natalia Arlovskaya, read the name in the passport. There was an unfamiliar stamp on the passport that read: International relations, Belarus, full clearance.

“With my sister’s papers there won’t be anyone that would dare to question your movements.”

 

A week later in the Russian embassy Natalia was again handed a new passport. This one was for Natasha Romanoff. Her hair had now been turned from blonde to black and she still wasn’t sure if the whirlwind of her life wasn’t some fever dream cooked up by her brain in the cold Moscow alley. She still didn’t know who exactly Ivan Bragnisky or his mysterious sister Natalia Arlovskaya were. Only that their names opened up lots of doors and that for some reason unknown, Ivan had decided to protect her. Someone else might have started to believe in guardian angels or miracles, but not her. Natalia-no, Natasha, did not believe in miracles.

Which left her with no explanation whatsoever, only endless questions. Spending the week with the mysterious Ivan had been enough time to fill Natasha with questions to last a lifetime.

“Go now. Tino will show you to the harbour.”

“I still don’t understand. What do you get in return from helping me?”

Ivan’s smile was incredibly sad. Broken even. “There is red on my ledger. I would like to wipe it out.”

Natasha hesitated, but soon the irresistible pull that she felt towards the tall man won out and she pulled Ivan into a hug. This was the first time in her life that she had initiated an embrace, but with this person it felt natural. There was again the smell that could only be described as “home” and the utter feeling of belonging being this close to Ivan. The taller man’s tears left a damp spot on Natasha’s shoulder, but when they pulled apart his eyes were clear.

“Thank you.” Natasha said and meant it. Then she turned around with heavy heart, but at the same time feeling a new sense of freedom and lightness enter her. Natalia would be no more and Natasha would make her own way in America.

 

 


End file.
